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The (#1 Secret) to Building (Business that Works Is . . .)

Using strategies that work with people you’re trying to sell to. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Study and draw inspiration from great business strategies that work.

I’m not talking about building a business that you think it’s great.

I’m talking about building a business in a way that has been proved to work, consistently.

Why great entrepreneurs favors clock building

Jim Collins put clock building concept in a proper perspective by letting you consider this example:

“Imagine you met a remarkable person who could look at the sun or stars at any time of day or night and state the exact time and date:“It’s April 23, 1401, 2:36 A.M., and 12 seconds.”

This person would be a fantastic time teller, and we’d probably admire that person for the ability to tell time.

But wouldn’t that person be even more amazing if, instead of telling the time, he or she built a clock that could tell the time forever, even after he or she was dead and gone?”

Clock building is the shift from seeing the company as a way to a product success to seeing the product as a way to company’s success.

In other words, it’s saying the business is the product.

The company is the ultimate creation.

This shift in thinking is what led to 3M second president to hold onto the company even after eleven years of not receiving a salary.

Is what kept Sony alive in the early days while they were stitching wires on a cloth to make crude, but sellable, heating pads just to make a day’s meal.

It has been like this through history and with this shift in thinking is what led the likes of Bill Hewlett, Sam Walton, Masaru Ibuka and few others to focus most of their time in building an organization.

A conducive environment where great ideas can be born and thrive rather than focusing their time on chasing ideas and products.

Back to you

If you equate the success of your company with the success of a particular idea—as many businesspeople do—then you’re more likely to give up on the company if that idea fails.

And if that idea happens to succeed, you’re more likely to have an emotional love affair with that idea and stick with it too long, when the company should be moving vigorously on to other things.

But if you see the ultimate creation as the company, not the execution of a particular idea or capitalizing on a timely market opportunity, then you can persist beyond any specific idea—good or bad—and move toward becoming an enduring great institution.

Build your business with a focus on making it a lasting and enduring institution for the years to come.

Following in the footsteps of successful organization which has done so.